John Jacobsen
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Reflections on a Year of Daily Memory Drawings
http://zerolib.com/daily-composition-lessons-learned.html
Sun, 17 Sep 2017 19:00:00 -0500
Reflections on a Year of Daily Memory Drawings

Reflections on a Year of Daily Memory Drawings

art

365 Drawings

The sketchbooks shown below are the result of doing one drawing from
memory every day for a year, a project I finished this month.

Figure 1: A year’s worth of Daily Compositions

This drawing practice was based on the Daily Composition, which, as I
explained last January, is an exercise from The Natural Way to Draw,
by Kimon Nicolaïdes (published posthumously in 1941). The
requirements for this exercise are as follows:

See things and events that interest you throughout the day;

Remember them, and

Capture them on paper, in the form of a single image …

… Once per day.

Each of these is challenging in its own way, and each reinforces the
other. Maintaining the practice over a full year taught me a number
of lessons.

Figure 2: Example drawing: 54th and Cornell

Lesson 1: The limits of visual memory

I’d struggled with this exercise now and again over the years, and in
taking it up again I was immediately reminded just how little I
remember of what I see throughout the day.

The mind is able to recognize, and, to a greater or lesser extent, to
respond mentally and emotionally to a stunning variety of objects and
occurrences in the world around us. This happens automatically and
without effort. But this sort of ordinary seeing is not the same as
being able to recall and to visually reproduce the things we
“see.”

To demonstrate this to yourself, try to draw your spouse’s face, or a
friend’s, from memory. This is a person you would have no trouble
recognizing, even at some distance, yet you don’t really have access
to how your brain stores that information. Now try to draw your car,
or bicycle, or the front of your building. These are things you know
well, yet you probably cannot describe them visually in much detail.

Doing this exercise faithfully made this fact painfully obvious. Each
day, out of the millions of details that passed in front of my eyes, I
was left grasping only a handful of facts to work with at day’s end.
(The number of memories was small, but I was surprised that it was
never zero.)

Contrast this with the capabilities of a camera: it faithfully records
the details it is exposed to, millions of bits of data per shot. But
the camera, a mere machine, cannot recognize or react emotionally to
those details1.

Figure 3: Adams St. Bridge

Lesson 2: Trying to remember amplifies seeing

It would be easy to think of the Daily Composition exercise as a way
of learning how to do a camera’s job: you are exposed to scenes, and
later you record them on paper. I did find myself, in fact, taking
mental “pictures” most days, of a person or group doing something, in
some specific place. I would see a person getting into a cab, or
construction workers huddled over a hole, or (one day) a unicycle
rider cresting a small hill, and I would think, “that’s it!” and try
to remember, for that evening’s drawing, everything I could about the
moment I’d just seen.

During the course of the year, I didn’t actually get that much better
in terms of the sheer number of details I could recall. A half dozen
“facts” (the size and shape of a doorway; the size and number of
windows in a storefront; the particular shape of a woman’s boots),
along with a rough gesture for and/or placement of the key figures,
were about as I could expect for any given day’s drawing.

A much bigger change occurred in my ability to notice things, and my
emotional response to them was amplified. Knowing that I needed
material for a drawing at the end of the day simply opened my eyes
more. It was like going on vacation somewhere totally new. I saw
things in my neighborhood, and on my commute, that I had passed by
without noticing for years: the shapes and placement of signs, light
poles, fire hydrants; the construction and weathering of steel
supports for elevated trains; the multitudes of ornamental details on
buildings. The endless variety of people’s faces… commuters,
shopkeepers, construction workers, homeless men and women; the smiles,
grim stares (especially at commute times) or lines of care they bore;
their postures and gestures (all too often, in relationship to their
phones); the cut and fit of their clothing, coats, boots or shoes.
The endless repetitive movements of pigeons, and the surprising
variety of other birds (sparrows, hawks, cranes, herons, geese, ducks,
swallows, and several migratory bird species I couldn’t identify).
The printed word, in steel or brass relief, to be seen everywhere in
streets and sidewalks, indicating lines of survey, or the origin or
builders of utility covers or nearby buildings. All the endless
varieties of trees, contours of trunks, branching patterns, leaves,
and all the grasses, flowers and weeds of the city… these things
came to my notice, were revealed fresh as though I had previously had
some sort of screen over my vision that had fallen away.

Part of seeing these things became caring about them. In that regard I
became less, not more, like a camera.

Figure 4: Promontory Point

Lesson 3: Emotion aids recall

If I saw something I reacted to emotionally, it was usually a lot
easier to recall later. This seems obvious, but to live the connection
between emotion and memory as part of one’s daily routine for a year
had a cumulative effect. This is what I meant when I said in my last
post that I felt a stronger connection to Chicago and my surroundings.
I suspect that building these sorts of connections to daily life is
one of the main reason Nicolaïdes recommends the exercise as a daily
practice.

Figure 5: South Loop Mural and Smoker

Lesson 4: Other tricks for remembering

Aside from focusing on things that give an emotional charge, here are
some more tricks I used to remember things I saw:

Practice drawing or painting something while you look at it. This
includes making movements in the air as if you were drawing,
building a little actual muscle memory (and inviting curious
glances from passersby).

Re-remember things. If I saw something I wanted to “save up” for
the evening’s drawing, then whenever I saw something else that
looked interesting, I would look carefully at it, but then I would
use the whole noticing-something-noteworthy experience as a
reminder to remember the other thing I was trying to remember
also. In other words, every new thing I noticed became a reminder
to remember the other thing. Occasionally, I would build a list of
things to remember and would then go through the list items
one-by-one whenever this occurred.

De-distract and focus. Of course, sometimes the above tricks got
to be too much; at those times, I’d try to minimize my visual input
by looking down at the sidewalk if safe to do so (allowing my
peripheral vision or looking up when needed, in order to keep from
getting hit by buses, etc.), just making the effort to hold the
memories in my mind while I walked or ran.

Figure 6: Weed whacking on the Lakefront

Lesson 5: Invention and knowledge help fill in details

Given a relative paucity of remembered facts, how do you complete your
drawing? Just as our mind fills in details about what we see without
our being consciously aware of it, one can invent the elements of a
scene that elude our grasp when we try to recall them. For this, a
knowledge of perspective, of human anatomy and clothing, of the
construction of builings and plants and trees, and especially of light
and shadow are indispensible for adding extra life and believability to
a composition, no matter how quickly executed. For example, I would
rarely remember a specific shadow, but if I knew where I was and
what time it was, I could place the shadows based on where the sun
would have been at the time. Used skillfully, invention can also amplify
whatever emotional response led one to record the scene in one’s mind
to begin with.

I think I got slightly better at “filling in the gaps” this way over
the year. The exercise does seem to strengthen the connection
between memory, knowledge, and imagination.

Figure 7: Dearborn subway entrance

Lesson 6: Drawing can distort memory; revisiting a place helps

I often noticed that, after drawing something that occurred in a
specific place, my memory would be strongly affected by whatever
inventions (or mistakes) I came up with to compensate for my ignorance
of the drawing’s setting. For this reason, I sometimes disliked
looking at the drawings after the fact because they were so clearly
wrong and they interfered with my “real” memory of where the event
occurred. An easy remedy for this was just to go back to the place in
question and look around. One sees many more details the second time
around, and it’s always amusing and humbling to realize how wrong you
got it the first time.

On a related note, I find that taking and reviewing photographs
shapes my memory as well. I remember things differently, and more
emotionally, having drawn them, either from life or from memory, than
I do when I’ve photographed them. I sometimes limit my photography
when I travel for this reason (although I still take a ton of
pictures).

Figure 8: North Avenue Apple Store

Lesson 7: Don’t make it a big deal

To do the exercise three hundred and sixty five days in a row did
require commitment, since I have a busy schedule and was generally
doing it at the end of the day when my willpower budget and my ability
to focus were all but spent.

Nicolaïdes makes a point of not making a big deal of these drawings,
setting a fifteen minute time limit for each. I broke this rule many
times, especially at the beginning when I would try to recall as much
as possible. Eventually, however, I settled for just jotting down a
few things I remembered seeing (sometimes starting with just
remembering where I was and what I did, which could be hard enough),
and turning the most compelling memory into a small composition. Even
on days when I was the most busy and distracted I could typically
remember at least one thing to put down on paper. And I found there
was only a loose correlation between how much effort I put into
remembering things throughout any given day, and how much I liked the
drawing at the end of that day. Some days I was excited about the
results, and some days I was just happy to put the drawing away
afterward. Part of what’s good about doing something like this is you
can fail over and over again, and your daily commitment to the
practice means that any specific failure is no big deal.2

Figure 9: Cyclists kissing at The Point

Lesson 8: More can be better

At least half the drawings are so bad, I find them pretty painful to
look at now. Many of them show an interesting tidbit or idea worth
developing further. And a small fraction, less than 10%, I enjoy
looking at and find appealing on their own terms. Some of these are
shown here.

The few successes illustrate an important rule that I still struggle
with: with art making, sometimes quantity wins. I prefer to work for
a long time on paintings, but it is nice to complete something every
day and, occasionally, to have it succeed. No matter who you are, I
suspect if you make a drawing a day for a whole year, at least a few
of them will suprise and please you.

Figure 10: Randolph and Wabash

Lesson 9: It’s about composition

Composition is about choosing what goes in a picture and arranging
those things in a pleasing design which communicates one’s ideas or
intentions. One reason I took up this practice is that I find
inventing compositions (e.g., in the studio) more challenging than
finding them directly in front of me. Ultimately, memory and
rendering are only part of the practice… the rest (perhaps the
biggest part) is design. Nearly four hundred drawings later I still
find it challenging, but solving a specific design problem every night
has made the whole problem of composition seem tractable in a way it
didn’t before. This, I imagine, was another reason Nicolaïdes
emphasized this exercise.

Figure 11: Planting Bulbs

Moving forward

It will be helpful if you keep this up for a year, and it will be
twice as helpful if you keep it up for two years. The really serious
student will make a quick composition every day for the rest of his
life despite everything else he has to do. –Nicolaïdes

In later chapters of The Natural Way to Draw, variations on the
Daily Composition are introduced, including a greater amount of
invention, and revisiting the same scene over several days in an
extended composition. For myself, I wanted the challenge of working
primarily from memory for a year, but have increasingly been craving
more time for both invention and for working from life. I intend to
continue regular compositional practice, but more as a natural and
playful part of my creative rhythm, rather than as a tightly-defined
daily practice. I don’t know where it will lead, but look forward to
finding out.